Hungry ghosts stirred: Arguments reignite over controversial shipwreck
Sunday, 31 May 2026
Efforts have been renewed to recover the remains of 499 Chinese miners from a shipwreck off Northland’s coast. But the moves have met a bureaucratic brick wall and exposed cultural and family clashes. Mike White reports on the controversial case of the SS Ventnor.
Some say it’s a race against time. Some say the race is over, the time has passed.
Some say act now. Others say move on.
At the centre of the story is a ship, the SS Ventnor, which sank with the remains of 499 Chinese miners being transported back to their villages near Guangzhou for reburial.
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For more than a decade, heated debate has continued about what to do with the wreck, and those still entombed on it: Recover the remains and complete their journey to China as the miners wanted, or leave them where they are, in 150m of water, 15km from shore, in what is effectively a maritime graveyard.
The issue has become personal and political, with splits among communities and families.
And now, it’s set to head to court, with the restless, voiceless souls who went down with the Ventnor, still at the heart of competing claims and clashing cultures.
Ship of souls
In October 1902, soon after leaving Wellington, the Ventnor hit a reef, eventually sinking off Hokianga Harbour on Northland’s west coast.
Thirteen crew and passengers drowned, but there were hundreds more bodies on board.
These were the remains of the nearly 500 Chinese miners whose bodies had been exhumed from New Zealand cemeteries, their bones washed and then placed in coffins to be returned to their villages in China.
This was part of their strong belief that unless they were returned to their homeland, where their families could pay respect and attend their graves, they would be wandering souls, or “hungry ghosts”.
The cargo of the miners’ remains had been organised by Dunedin businessman Choie Sew Hoy, who died before the voyage, and whose coffin was also loaded aboard, bound for Hong Kong and then his ancestral village.
After the Ventnor sank his son, Kum Poy Sew Hoy, hired a steamer to search for the wreck, desperate to retrieve the bodies and allow them to continue home.
By then, some coffins and bones had washed ashore, where they were reburied by Māori.
But it wasn’t until 2013 that the Ventnor was located by a remote operated vehicle.
The person behind this discovery was John Albert (Ngāpuhi, Tūhoe, Ngāti Maniopoto, Te Arawa) who had grown up in the Hokianga being warned by his parents to behave, otherwise ghosts from the shipwreck would seek him out.
Decades later, standing on cliffs overlooking the wreck site, Albert says he was seized by the spirits from the Ventnor, imploring him to help them continue their voyage home.
His calling has become a mission: Retrieve the remaining coffins and bones, and transport them back to China for reburial.
“All they wanted to do was to go home,” says Albert. “You don’t have to be Chinese or even family to care.”
After locating the wreck, and being asked to provide further evidence for the government that it was the Ventnor, in 2014 Albert organised the first people to reach the wreck since it sank.
The team included two of the world’s most famous divers - Richard “Harry” Harris and Craig Challen - who became internationally renowned in 2018 when they helped rescue 12 boys and their football coach from Thailand’s Tham Luang cave. Both were named Australians of the Year, and Harris also features in the recent Netflix documentary Deeper, making the world’s deepest cave dive, in New Zealand.
The divers retrieved five objects from the wreck, including a porthole and a bell, to prove it was the Ventnor.
But instead of congratulations and kudos, the group was attacked as grave robbers and treasure hunters, and accused of retrieving skulls to sell to Chinese museums.
This was despite everything they did being completely legal, as ships wrecked after 1900 are able to be dived on with artefacts recovered.
So Heritage New Zealand and the New Zealand Chinese Association combined to hastily have the wreck designated an archaeological site, meaning it couldn’t be disturbed or any other artefacts removed.
Despite being the ones who’d identified the Ventnor, and provided Heritage New Zealand with the coordinates it used to officially gazette the wreck, this fast-tracked decision was made without consulting or notifying Albert’s group.
And it’s this protection, which has stymied Albert’s aims of continuing the miners’ voyage home for more than a decade, that he is now preparing to challenge in court.
Albert says extreme misinformation and lies were spread about him and his group, and this was swallowed by Heritage New Zealand without any attempt to verify the damaging rumours.
Moreover, he argues the wreck’s gazetting as an archaeological site was so rushed, legislative requirements were ignored.
Heritage New Zealand’s own guidelines state the process must be ”rigorous and transparent so all parties involved are aware of the purpose and legal outcomes”; that it will notify and consult those with a registered interest in the site and affected parties before approving a declaration; and it must provide evidence of this consultation.
Albert says failure to notify the group that found the wreck shows this didn’t happen. Heritage New Zealand documents show it consulted only with local authorities and those in the Chinese community.
And Heritage New Zealand’s own report into the wreck before it was gazetted admits it was completed “based on limited desktop research”; included “brief overviews” of relevant literature; and points to “time constraints in undertaking the research” due to the “urgency of the situation”.
This urgency, was supposedly because of the “potential risk of fossickers”, the report says.
But the wreck is so deep only specialist divers can reach it, in a dive taking seven hours, and costing $6000 just for helium gas alone.
Heritage New Zealand denies its 2014 gazetting of the Ventnor as an archaeological site was rushed or inadequate, now describing its assessment as “thorough”.
But the organisation has never actually visited the wreck or surveyed it, and instead relied on information from Albert’s Project Ventnor Group, even while its Northland manager, Bill Edwards, suggested Albert is tantamount to a grave robber.
“How do you define a grave robber?” He said in 2023. “A grave robber goes in and takes things without informing people about what they’re doing and has no process. So, if that’s the definition of a grave robber, then John Albert was certainly on the edge of it.”
Indeed, although the Ventnor’s protection is based on legislation requiring 'investigation by archaeological methods', to provide evidence of its cultural or heritage value, this has never been done, and has been ruled out by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage.
Heritage New Zealand insists its staff never made misleading or incorrect statements about those who discovered the Ventnor, though accepts “highly charged language” was used by some people.
The New Zealand Chinese Association also denies it was involved in sharing misinformation.
However, its president at the time labelled the divers “opportunists”, and letters it sourced in support of the wreck being designated an archaeological site include claims the wreck was being “disrespectfully pillaged”, and “plundered”.
That last allegation was made by Liu Shueng Wong, sometimes called “the Ventnor woman”.
Wong’s interest in the Ventnor began in 2007 and she has been influential in the New Zealand Chinese Association’s opposition to Albert and his plans to repatriate the miners’ remains.
She says it’s improbable and impractical that the miners could be recovered, and there’s no way of sending them to the correct village for reburial.
“How would you do it? It just can’t be a higgledy-piggledy mess.”
Wong says there are three memorials on land to those on the Ventnor, and this is where relatives and the Chinese community can pay their respects, including the annual qingming or “tomb-sweeping” ceremony.
She maintains what Albert’s group did was the equivalent of grave robbing, and calls him a “shipwrecker”, saying what he’s proposing “violates what we need to do for our ancestors”.
“It’s incredibly complicated now. So the Chinese believe it has to be treated as a cemetery, and please, please, everybody else leave it alone.”
Duncan’s Dream
The New Zealand Chinese Association says it speaks for the descendants of the Ventnor miners and the clear consensus of its members is that “the remains should be left to rest, and not be disturbed or returned to China”.
And, despite having never visited the wreck, despite the Project Ventnor Group’s involvement for 15 years, and despite members of several other nationalities dying when the Ventnor sank, the group claims it owns and should control the story of the shipwreck.
“Alongside our iwi partners, the NZCA has moral guardianship and story sovereignty over the history and the narratives around it and the post-2007 events.”
In a 30-page application to Heritage New Zealand for the wreck to be classified as a heritage site, the association never names John Albert or the Project Ventnor Group, effectively writing them out of the Ventnor’s modern history.
All of which angers Duncan Sew Hoy.
The Dunedin businessman is the great-grandson of Choie Sew Hoy who organised for the miners’ remains to be repatriated, and whose body was also on the Ventnor.
The Sew Hoy family is one of only two known families with ancestors aboard - the descendants of the others are unclear or unknown. And given Choie Sew Hoy’s role, the family’s views carry great weight.
Duncan Sew Hoy says he initially believed the misinformation and gossip being spread about Albert and the divers, and was induced to support Heritage New Zealand protecting the wreck as an archaeological site.
But he came to realise the allegations were false, and a tactic to push through the gazetting under bad faith. He now wants the gazetting rescinded, and agrees the remains should be recovered and returned to China.
In 2025, more than 200 of Choie Sew Hoy’s descendants - from 12 countries - held a reunion in Guangzhou.
A survey carried out soon after, saw 91% of Sew Hoy family members vote to recover the miners’ bones and return them to China.
Duncan’s brother Donald, a former senior New Zealander of the Year, has also been strongly supportive of Albert’s work to repatriate the remains.
“You are the ones with the vision and desire to solve the massive Ventnor shipwreck,” he wrote to Albert this year. “You are all good people and very caring … and I wish you all the success.”
For Duncan, realising the miners’ wishes to be buried in China is a race against time. Not only because he is 90 but because the Ventnor is collapsing and, as it does, it will destroy the bodies forever.
“And when they’re smashed up, they will be washed all over the place, and there might not be any gravesite intact.”
He can’t understand why an influential few behind the Chinese Association’s opposition to recovering the bones, would let this happen.
“What is the true reason for anybody, in their humanitarian mind, to not let the remains, while they are still intact, be brought back to be buried on shore in China? Why do they prefer to have the remains in the vessel when they know they will be destroyed?”
Sew Hoy has asked the Chinese Association this question but “they have not given me any reasons. There’s no logic behind it”.
He believes the technology for recovery exists, there is a site for a common grave in China, and funding will come if the project is allowed.
He also believes it can be a win-win for everyone, with qingming performed in Hokianga for miners remaining there, and in China for those returned home.
“Luckily, I’ve been on both sides. So I can see who’s right and who’s wrong. I’m the fortunate guy.”
Dreaming of home
Liu Shueng Wong labels the plan “Duncan’s dream”.
“You can have wishes and dreams, and I think he will die with that dream,” she says bluntly.
But Albert is determined to make it come true.
He believes the hostility directed at him by the Chinese Association and Wong (who has accused him of being a “come-by-lately Māori”, and suggests he has rummaged among miners’ bones) was because they believed he was stealing the Ventnor narrative from them when he discovered the wreck.
The way Albert sees it is simple: Chinese immigrants and miners were treated harshly in New Zealand, had paid to have their bodies returned to China, desperately wanted to be buried in their homeland, and that journey was interrupted. Now he wants to complete it for them.
'It’s not about glory, limelight, fame, or fortune for me - it’s about doing the right thing.“
Despite claims the group have trampled on bodies and looted the site, the truth is no divers have gone inside the wreck.
But through sections of the hull that have already collapsed, skulls and bones can clearly be seen, scattered in the ship’s interior.
A forensic report based on photos taken by divers said there was clear evidence remains had already been damaged, likely due to the movement of debris.
Albert says if nothing is done soon, bones and any remaining coffins will be smashed and washed ashore, providing the ultimate indignity to the miners.
“It’s such a sad story. They end up at the bottom of the ocean, they’ve been there for over 100 years, they’ve been basically ignored, and now they’re at risk of being destroyed.”
Despite this, Heritage New Zealand is refusing to revoke the archaeological site designation that would allow bones to be recovered, saying it hasn’t seen “scientific evidence indicating the wreck is likely to collapse imminently in a way that would disperse human remains”.
Minister for Culture and Heritage Paul Goldsmith says the gazetting is Heritage New Zealand’s responsibility, and “it would not be appropriate for me to second-guess that process”.
None of this deters Albert, who just wants to finish what Choie Sew Hoy envisaged and expedited.
In that respect, he views things in the same way as the Cheong Shing Tong organisation Sew Hoy headed, which organised the Ventnor shipment, and wrote in its rules:
“The breast of the benevolent man is moved with compassion for fear that the wandering souls of the dead should famish.
“And there rests on us a duty imperative, on us fellow-villagers and fellow-sojourners: Then how can we endure to sit on one side and look on?”